Acer announced its first Ultrabook, the Aspire S3, back in early September. The lightweight notebook matched Apple's MacBook Air not only in looks, but also in its maximum thickness of 17mm.

Today at CES, Acer announced the next logical progression in its Ultrabook lineup: the Aspire S5. The Aspire S5 is even thinner, measuring in at just 15mm at its thickest point. Despite the slight decrease in thickness, the 13.3-inch Aspire S5 still weighs at the same 2.97 pounds.

Acer isn't revealing much about the innards of the Aspire S5, but we do know that it features an SSD, USB 3.0 connectivity, an HDMI port, and a Thunderbolt connector for 20Gbps transfers.

"The Ultrabook is much more than just a product segment," said Jim Wong, president of Acer Inc. "It's a new trend that will become the mainstream for mobile PCs, and customers will see the unique features gradually extended across Acer's notebook family."

I wonder what it would cost in money/weight to have each key or one big flat area be touch capacitive instead of being the dust prone, easily broken, hard to clean, floating plastic mess they usually have. That way there would be almost no moving parts except the screen hinges. I used to have to support laptops in the corporate IT department, and I remember broken keyboards were a HUGE part of the RMA costs. When a person can drop a pen onto the keyboard and cannot work because of a crooked key I rather just pay for better upfront and not have to worry about it.

I think the capacitive touch idea could work quite well if the touch keys had some kind of space/groove or gap between each of them, so you could still physically feel the keys, maybe making it ok for people like you (and me, and we're a large majority i'd think). The only downside is that you'd get no feedback that you properly pressed the key as they wouldn't move down, but that could also somewhat be fixed if the sound of a key press was played.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007